Glutamate is the primary molecule that neurons use to communicate with each other. Previously, scientists have mostly recorded when neurons fire output signals, but now with a new glutamate indicator, they can record the many inputs that causes cells to fire. 🧵 #neuroskyence

Felt a little festive at the microscope this morning for #FluorescenceFriday 🎄 Here’s the nervous system of a juvenile sea star ⭐️ Green = acetylated tubulin, red = nuclei Happy holidays!

I don't always get pretty, isolated, AND transfected primary neurons in culture, but when I do I take advantage.... Rat hippocampal neuron overexpressing ThymosinB4-mScarlet and imaged for 16hr on a @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM880 with Airyscan. #FluorescenceFriday #Microscopy

my festive spirit amidst our grimly stupid reality (2025)

I had cataract surgery. I now perceive colours, dimensions, and shapes differently from before surgery. What I saw before was 'real' to me. What I see now is 'real' to me. But they are two very different ways of seeing. The experience has really brought home to me how subjective perception can be.

A heartwarming Christmas meme…

First, real talk on what’s happening here: Today’s neofascist oligarch politics, where power is concentrated into the hands of a few billionaires and their lackeys, requires lies and propaganda. So their power is threatened by any action that makes public debate better fairer or more truthful.

A white man fails upward into the vice presidency and continues to make white victimhood his entire personality

We know that birds can sense magnetic fields for navigation. But how does that work? Do they have little magnets wired up to their brains? The most likely answer is 1000X times weirder than that, and involves quantum spin. Let's talk about 'cryptochromes' & magnetic sensing.🧪

You can now read the preprint on arxiv arxiv.org/abs/2512.19156

Classical billiards can compute. With Isaac Ramos, we show that 2D billiard systems are Turing complete, implying the existence of undecidable trajectories in physically natural models from hard-sphere gases to celestial mechanics. Determinism ≠ predictability. 🎱🧠 @upc.edu @ricardsole.bsky.social

DOJ briefly uploaded this letter from Jeff Epstein to serial child molester Larry Nassar: "Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to 'grab snatch,' whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system."

A new atlas of the human dorsal root ganglion contains more than 53,000 neurons and nearly 500,000 non-neuronal cells from 126 people. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/peripheral-n...

This is what sand looks like under a microscope. Amazing.

Among the newly-released Epstein files. This Justice Dept email from Jan 2020 'I wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously has been reported"

In one sentence: We argue that brain function IS anatomically localized, but that organization doesn’t look much like Brodmann brain areas.

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Sounds bad. www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

I know everyone is dunking on #BariWeiss right now, but it is #Paramount CEO #DavidEllison who is her patron. Would love to see some blowback to this billionaire-handmaid to authoritarianism too.

Does it make sense to talk about “good traits” and “bad traits”? Watch my interview with Dr. Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) about eugenics. #Biology #Genetics #Science Full interview: youtu.be/D_Wu7LBXF70

Insulting their intelligence is too easy, but the thing about self-satisfied fiends like Bobby Jr. and Bari Weiss is that they work from the assumption that they're the first people to consider anything, and their ignorance is somehow brave.

Free Will Absolutely Does Exist with Dr. Kevin Mitchell - Factually! www.youtube.com/watch?v=26Ng... - I'd forgotten about this one - a very fun chat with Adam Conover! 😊

BREAKING: George Osborne to take up new role as Head of Governmental Relations for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He’ll be lobbying for the creation of an expanded network of bridleways to ensure that the horsemen are unimpeded when they commence their deadly ride.

"One longtime colleague and friend, [John Ioannidis] who has kept in touch with [Bhattacharya], pleads for scientists—and reporters—to give him a chance. " Ioannidis is part of the COVID contrarian crew. Of course he says that. It's like a Big Oil exec asking to give EPA head Lee Zeldin a chance.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Streisand Effect, when merged, become the Bari Weiss Effect

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Telling good science from bad – a user’s guide to navigating the scientific literature www.wiringthebrain.com/2021/08/tell...

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

This whole thread is horrifying and contains MANY new details. This documentary needs to be torrented and played everywhere to the shame, vilification, and electoral destruction of Weiss, Miller, and all the collaborators and enablers

i've updated my history of AI poster. new version is on my website. 🥳

Except that we won’t. The social Darwinism and eugenics are a huge part of MAHA. After all, a key idea behind the antivax movement is that vaccine-preventable diseases can’t harm you if you’re healthy and that if you’re not healthy it’s your fault.

"Bondi and company are sorely mistaken if they think breaking the law and giving Congress a middle finger will make the Epstein scandal go away."

This is also the Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad story. While many scientists and doctors today do feel responsibility to their profession and to the public, some self-promoter contrarians who worship power have been elevated to the upper echelons of science. 1/

What is even happening…?

“That one we think has great potential because injecting gene therapy into the penis sounds exciting,” says Leshko. Exciting to whom?!

This is well worth a read. It is essentially qualitative, which some might baulk at, but sometimes that's the way to start fleshing out an idea.

Man Ray - Character (Seated Woman) 1939.

A little review of some of the things I wrote this year. 🧵 It was of course the Year of Quantum, a highlight of which was the meeting on Helgoland in the summer. Here's what that was all about, and what happened there. www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/the-hol...

One of the most important books I've read this year, from @adambecker.bsky.social. It's a devastating read at times—you'll find yourself shouting at the book "how can they be that goddamn crazy???!!!" But it's critical to realize that they are.

Telling good science from bad – a user’s guide to navigating the scientific literature www.wiringthebrain.com/2021/08/tell...

Reposting b/c I had the incorrect ID the 1st time. This jelly is Crosotta. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 883 #argentiniandeepseeps #MarineLife #CONICET

I love this plot illustrating the famous generation-time effect on mutation rates with modern data!

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

Pure fanaticism, just objectively bad policy especially while building all these new data centers. But also an opportunity for Democrats to say loudly, over and over again, that Trump and Republicans are making everything more expensive. Higher electricity costs impact everything.

At least we have the foreign press to tell us how it is

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Mindscape Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University. After a tough year for higher education, I give a pitch for the most idealistic, aspirational conception of the value of a liberal-arts education. #MindscapePodcast Happy Holidays all! www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...

As many of you know, I’ve been fascinated by brain attractor dynamics lately. Thrilled to share a new preprint on their link to orthogonal neural representations, co-authored with Karl Friston: arxiv.org/abs/2505.22749 - with implications for both neuroscience & AI! First in a series - stay tuned!